The GameFlow model strives to be a general model of player enjoyment,
applicable to all game genres and platforms. Derived from a general set of
heuristics for creating enjoyable player experiences, the GameFlow model has
been widely used in evaluating many types of games, as well as non-game
applications. However, we recognize that more specific, low-level, and
implementable criteria are potentially more useful for designing and evaluating
video games. Consequently, the research reported in this paper aims to provide
detailed heuristics for designing and evaluating one specific game genre,
real-time strategy games. In order to develop these heuristics, we conducted a
grounded theoretical analysis on a set of professional game reviews and
structured the resulting heuristics using the GameFlow model. The resulting 165
heuristics for designing and evaluating real-time strategy games are presented
and discussed in this paper.

An investigation of Vladimir Propp's 31 functions and 8 broad character
types and how they apply to the analysis of video games

This paper is concerned with answering the following question: "Is Vladimir
Propp's Model (31 Functions and 8 Broad Character Types) a valid model with
which to analyse games from a variety of gaming genres?" More specifically what
genres of games can be analysed by this model and in what terms? Can the model
only be used to analyse the story arcs of games or can it also be used for
analysis of level narrative and even perhaps for dialogue between the player
character and computer controlled characters? In this paper, Propp's Model will
be used to analyse selected games from a variety of genres in terms of
character archetypes, story arc, level narrative and character dialogue. The
ability of the model to cope with in-game player decisions will also be
examined. The validity of the model as a video game analysis tool is assessed
and recommendations given on which video game genres the model is most
applicable.

Performing design analysis: game design creativity and the theatre of the
impressed

We report and reflect upon the early stages of a research project that
endeavours to establish a culture of critical design thinking in a tertiary
game design course. We first discuss the current state of the Australian game
industry and consider some perceived issues in game design courses and graduate
outcomes. The second section presents our response to these issues: a project
in progress which uses techniques originally exploited by Augusto Boal in his
work, Theatre of the Oppressed. We appropriate Boal's method to promote
critical design thinking in a games design class. Finally, we reflect on the
project and the ontology of design thinking from the perspective of Bruce
Archer's call to reframe design as a 'third academic art'.

This article focuses on personalised games, which we define as games that
utilise player models for the purpose of tailoring the game experience to the
individual player. The main contribution of the article is a motivation for
personalised gaming, supported by an extensive overview of scientific
literature. The motivatin concerns (a) the psychological foundation, (b) the
effect on player satisfaction, (c) the contribution to game development, and
(d) the requirement for achieving ambitions. The provided overview of
scientific literature goes into the subject of player modelling, as well as
eight adaptive components: (1) space adaptation, (2) mission/task adaptation,
(3) character adaptation, (4) game mechanics adaptation, (5) narrative
adaptation, (6) music/sound adaptation, (7) player matching (multiplayer), and
(8) difficulty scaling. In the concluding sections, the relationship to
procedural content generation is discussed, as well as the generalisation to
other domains.

A feasibility study in using facial expressions analysis to evaluate player
experiences

Current quantitative methods of measuring player experience in games are
mostly intrusive to play and less suited to natural, non-laboratory play
environments. This paper presents an initial study to validate the feasibility
of using facial expressions analysis for evaluating player experiences. It
builds on a prior position that video-based computer vision techniques can
provide a less intrusive and more versatile solution for automatic evaluation
of game user experiences. A user study was performed on an initial group of
participants in a first-person puzzle shooter game (Portal 2) and a social
drawing trivia game (Draw My Thing), and the results are shown to support our
position.

Using gameplay metrics to articulate player interaction within game systems
has received increased interest in game studies. The value of gameplay metrics
comes from a desire to empirically validate over a decade of theorization of
player experience and knowledge of games as ludic systems. Taking gameplay
metrics beyond formalized user testing (i.e. with the aim of improving a
product) allows researchers the freedom of examining any commercially available
game without the need to have access to the game's source code. This paper
offers a new methodology to obtain data on player behavior, achieved through
analyzing video and audio streams. Game interface features are being analyzed
automatically, which are indicative of player behavior and gameplay events.
This paper outlines the development of this methodology and its application to
research that seeks to understand the nature of engagement and player
motivations.

So far, the main focus of AI research around RTS games has been towards
creating autonomous, virtual opponents to compete against human beings or other
autonomous players. At the same time, popular commercial titles are increasing
their emphasis on micro-management; neglecting development towards further
autonomy. This paper proposes a simple reactive agent that is proficient in
combat tasks. This agent will be the basis of individual units; forming the
backbone of a multiagent system. Built on this is a novel control scheme that
is designed to aid a human player; deferring all strategic decisions to the
controller. Finally, the paper will show the results of experiments designed to
evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

Providing both physical and perceived affordances using physical games
pieces on touch based tablets

Whilst capacitive touch screen phones and tablets, such as the iPhone and
iPad, are increasingly becoming one of the main forms of gaming platform, the
nature of the touch interface and the lack of physical feedback are seen as
limitations. In this research we investigate how physical game pieces can be
used to augment tablet games to provide both physical and perceived affordance
through direct tangible interaction. After devising a scheme for the creation
of such games pieces that can support both static and dynamic interaction, the
concept is demonstrated through the creation of an air hockey game that uses an
iPad as the table and is played with physical air hockey mallets that interact
with the iPad surface and a virtual puck. Not only are the physical hockey
mallets perceived to add considerably to the enjoyment of the game, such game
pieces can be easily created using 3D printing and conductive cloth to provide
a range of functionality..

The emphasis of many studies investigating Virtual Learning Environments
(VLEs), including our own, has been on evaluating whether learning has occurred
and in determining what factors might have influenced learning. Participants
are typically asked to perform certain tasks and answer many questions about
their characteristics, preferences, experiences and what they learnt. But what
do participants see as relevant to tell us; perhaps they think we have missed
something important? To answer this question, we chose three diverse studies,
concerning realism, interactivity and immersion, and analyse the free-text
comments to see if any patterns could be found in what users were wanting to
tell us. Based on the analysis and literature, we suggest a set of categories
and usability attributes to be considered when designing and evaluating VLEs.

Understanding player experience finding a usable model for game
classification

Digital games receive an age restriction classification rating based on
their depiction of harmful content and its presumed impact on players. While
classification processes serve as predictors of the subsequent interactions
between player and game text they remain largely inferential and an exercise in
caution. Confounded by the medium's interactive nature, we argue that
classification processes would benefit from research that provides empirical
accounts of the interactive experience of games. This paper presents findings
taken from a research project with the aim of operationalizing over a decade of
Game Studies theorization on the distinct quality of games. The intention is to
produce an empirically validated model of media 'usage,' capable of informing
regulation processes and the classification of games (within a New Zealand
context). Here we draw on findings achieved from one component of our mixed
methodology research design [37] -- A structured diary method that was employed
to allow game players to chronicle different elements of their gameplay
experience with a single text as they progressed through it. The findings serve
to highlight the applied value of Game Studies' theory and its capacity to
account for the 'actual' experience of play and the ways game texts are
activated under the agency of players once they enter everyday life and
culture.

An investigation of player to player character identification via personal
pronouns

The player character is an important feature of many games, where it is
through the character that the player interacts with game world. There has been
considerable interest in the relationship between the player and the player
character. Much of this work has examined the identification of players with
their characters, generally taking either a textual analysis approach, or has
been empirical work that has explicitly identified the idea of identification
through survey instruments, etc. The work presented here takes a different
empirical approach, focusing on the use of various pronoun forms (first,
second, third) as an indication of the relationship between player and
character. Results indicate that the presence of story and information about
the player character had no effect on identification with the plater character.
However, characteristics of the players, particularly gender and general
experience in playing video games, did have a statistically significant affect,
indicating that different levels of identification are more dependent on the
player than on the game. This indicates that players are not a homogeneous
group with respect to player character identification and is an important
consideration for designers to recognise.

Challenging reality using techniques from interactive drama to support
social simulations in virtual worlds

Simulations of social situations have great potential to be applied to many
of the social problems that we find in society and organisations. Social
simulations can do more than provide experience and transfer current best
practice; they may be used to transform current social realities. As many
educationalists, organizations and researchers are finding, Virtual Worlds
(VWs) provide an environment for conducting person to person social
simulations. In this paper we consider a more challenging form of social
simulation in VWs involving intelligent social interactions between humans and
computer-based non-player characters in VWs, known as intelligent virtual
agents (IVAs). However, using IVAs to simulate social behavior requires some
reconsideration of the role that reality plays and challenges the definition of
a simulation as a representation of reality. By bringing in the element of
fiction (non-reality) often associated with drama, narrative and storytelling
together with virtual worlds, we can relax some of the constraints associated
with reality and go beyond reality. In beyond reality simulations, we actually
use simulations to exaggerate aspects of the real world in order to emphasize a
particular learning concept or even to break the rules, strategies, roles and
operators which apply in the real world.

Designing a game for occupational health and safety in the construction
industry

Safety in the construction industry is important because people continue to
be injured on construction sites. To address this, the Australian construction
industry and its regulator, the Office of the Australian Building and
Construction Commissioner, have required that anyone who intends to work on a
construction site must complete an Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S)
construction induction process.
One quite complex section of the construction induction training deals with
the identification of hazards and the management of hazards through controls to
prevent workers from injury. There is a multitude of worksite hazards and many
OH&S controls.
A key challenge for OH&S training is to engage learners. Serious Games
are a promising vehicle to engage learners and enhance their retention of
important concepts. This paper reports on the design decisions and the
development of an informative and entertaining game, which is intended to
motivate users to learn about workplace hazards. The game is also intended to
help users retain their knowledge of workplace hazards and their management,
and to assist with knowledge transfer into the real world.

This article discusses the application of an Alexandrian pattern language to
the design of interactive systems. It grew out of an University course titled A
Pattern Approach to Action Game Design, which was offered as an elective in the
Creative Technologies program at Auckland University of Technology, New
Zealand, in 2011. We sketch out the idea of design patterns and describe our
experiences with the process of using them for designing oldschool action
games, that is, finding patterns, making a language, using it for creating
several game designs and realizing one of these designs collaboratively. We
discuss the concept of the course and present our pattern language and the game
we made. While the language is arguably more like a patchy pattern collection,
the various game designs quite loose and the realized game unfinished, the
process was challenging and intense, and offered students a new perspective on
design. In the spirit of design patterns, we only did what the task at hand
required, not artificial exercises. We attempted to connect theory and practice
in a natural, direct way as we presented, discussed and used everything we did
in order to continue our journey. Our course was not aimed at fixed or frozen
products, but on a process that was constantly in flux through collaboration by
people who interact and share a common pattern language, use, test, revise and
refine it while moving on.

Agent-based architectures and Intelligent Virtual Agents have been used to
support education and exploration of objects and places of interest such as
exhibitions, museums and historical or cultural sites. We present a number of
issues from this body of work including: agent versus user control, education
versus entertainment, navigation of semantically enriched objects, believable
agents and the role of explanation. Key findings are applied to the design of
user-agent interactions for Virtual Saarlouis, an historic garrison town.

In a University course on phenomenology, embodiment and tangible
interaction, students were asked to design and build installations that can be
played. This article describes some of their works and the concept of the
course. The results are critically discussed. The aim of the course was to
invite and motivate students to connect phenomenological ideas with their own
work. Students were invited to uncover phenomenological theories, to explore
them on their own and to integrate their findings with their practice. We
attempted to establish a feedback loop of practical work and theoretical
reasoning, in a natural way, a holistic approach. The course appears to have
worked to get basic ideas of phenomenology across and to offer students a new
perspective. The relevance and significance of phenomenological concepts for
interaction design were shown. Many students successfully explored these and
found their own access and focus. The works show some interesting ideas, and it
is exciting to see first use of this powerful position in students' own
creative work within the domain of interactive systems.

This paper examines the varieties of digital play practices among students
in two high schools in Victoria, Australia, in order to get a situated
understanding of the patterns of youths' out-of-school gaming practices, and
the role the respondents perceived these practices have in their lives. In this
study we analysed survey questions that were administered to approximately
three hundred and thirty respondents across the two schools. The questions
focused on the technical details of play, particular games played, and
students' attitudes towards games. The questions dealing with students'
attitudes and perceptions of their play practices were analysed using factor
analysis and cluster analysis. The factor analysis revealed three factors,
interpreted as: Competition, Creation and Socialization. The cluster analysis
on these three dimensions revealed five clusters -- primarily social, primarily
creative, primarily competitive, overall positive, and overall negative. The
clusters were associated with other variables, in particular, students' gender,
amount of time they spent playing games, and access to technology.

New types of control devices for videogames have emerged and expanded the
demographics of the game playing public, yet little is known about which
populations of gamers prefer which style of interaction and why. This paper
presents data from a study that seeks to clarify the influence the control
interface has on the play experience. Three commercial control devices were
categorised using an existing typology, according to how the interface maps
physical control inputs with the virtual gameplay actions. The devices were
then used in a within-groups experimental design aimed at measuring differences
in play experience across 64 participants. Descriptive analysis is undertaken
on the performance, play experience and preference results for each device.
Potential explanations for these results are discussed, as well as the
direction of future work.

Studies dedicated to understanding the relationship between gaming and
mental health, have traditionally focused on the effects of depression,
anxiety, obsessive usage, aggression, obesity, and faltering 'real life'
relationships. The complexity of game genre and personality aside, this review
aims to define a space for a positive relationship between video game play and
wellbeing by applying current video game research to the criteria that defines
the wellbeing construct 'flourishing' [1]. Self-determination theory (SDT), and
flow provide context, and areas of overlap are explored.

This research has been conducted to ascertain whether people with certain
personality types exhibit preferences for particular game genres. Four hundred
and sixty-six participants completed an online survey in which they described
their preference for various game genres and provided measures of personality.
Personality types were measured using the five-factor model of personality.
Significant relationships between personality types and game genres were found.
The results are interpreted in the context of the features of particular game
genres and possible matches between personality traits and these features.

In this article, the Box Me Dumb Human installation is described. In this
installation, a large leather bunny puppet with red glowing eyes is boxed by
the player, while insulting/motivating him/her with arguments taken from the AI
debate. The player is fighting for all that is good about humanity, what
distinguishes it from abstract mechanism, and he/she is fighting against the
machine or system.

NOP is a French collective developing and questioning "New Orchestra
Practices". The collective's first project, NOP.nz, has been taking place in
New Zealand since May 2011 and uses a specific device; the Meta-Mallette. This
paper introduces the whole project, presents the goals of NOP.nz project and
the musical device Meta-Mallette. The performance proposed during the IE
conference will engage the participants into new digital orchestra practices,
playing a creation for joystick orchestra by Serge de Laubier, a French
composer.

In this paper, we present a web implementation of a poker bot, called
SARTRE, which uses case-based reasoning to play Texas Hold'em poker. SARTRE
uses a memory-based approach to create a betting strategy for two-player, limit
Texas Hold'em. Hand histories from strong poker players are observed and
encapsulated as cases that capture specific game state information. Betting
decisions are generalised by retrieving and re-using solutions from previous
similar situations. SARTRE participated in the 2009, 2010 and 2011 IJCAI
Computer Poker Competition's where the system was thoroughly evaluated by
challenging a range of other computerised opponents. SARTRE can now be
challenged online.

In this paper, we present an agent which uses case-based reasoning to play
the real-time strategy game StarCraft. Cases are gathered through observation
of human actions in particular situations, which are extracted from game log
files. Cases are then used by a domain-independent case-based reasoning
framework to make in-game actions based on human actions in similar situations.
This work aims to demonstrate a method for more easily creating better agents
in real-time strategy games.

A documentary film, US AND THE GAME INDUSTRY (2012) comes to you as curious
field research into some works by touted international independent games
developers. Three years in the making it focuses on 2D and 3D aesthetic. The
games are at the more succinct end of game design scales. Set within minimal
systems adherence or within seeming new phases of game asceticism, the film
sustains inquiry into design purpose and the principles of dynamic play.
There are five developers featured. Their games are deliverable to PC/Mac,
Play Station 3, the I-pad or I- phone, the DS and for server supported play.
All are high caliber participants in computer science and conceptual thinking,
born near the early 1980's. They carry with them expansive formative experience
with computer game forms. They attended American universities; Cornell, North
Western, Stanford, USC and Parsons; one recently graduated with a Phd at IT,
Copenhagen. One American resident is Chinese born. A fifth developer is born
and educated in Australia. For this group familiarity with algorithms and
decades of temporal lives with computers for play was the norm. These
characters as a social group who have not only experienced thousands of hours
with rules of play but are players as consumers who have now switched to
development. They were challenged by boredom and by opportunity, who, ignoring
other explosions such as gamification trends, set off to wield connoisseur
status and provide elegant ideas for universal appeal. They, against the tide
of 'the market', are almost recluses for months and years repeatedly so as to
focus individual attention on the complexity of code, the exquisite natures of
flow and games' potentials for human satisfactions.
Robin Hunicke is Executive Producer of JOURNEY. (thatgamecompany) and Jenova
Chen is creative director. This company's latest game is an adventure game held
to the form of a mono myth. Zach Gage (SpellTower) is a concept artist and a
relative newcomer to games design. SpellTower is a word game trumping word
games. Alexander Bruce (Demruth) has been working five years on one adventure
experience for the mind, Antichamber. It uses non-euclidean geometry. Douglas
Wilson (Die Gute Fabrik), is producing a swamp opera this year titled
MUTAZIONE. Jason Rohrer, developer of short games these last four years is to
reveal his next game, THE CASTLE DOCTRINE in the film.
These developers and their retinues stand as unique in their investment in
one-off game development. Their works represent the edge of critical review.
This cluster is a brief representation of people making games sophisticated
enough that many are taking pause with them in the ride of life and cultural
selection. Their scrutiny and élan with dynamism, puzzles, myth and
story speak of riches to be tackled and felt.
The filmed subjects are presented in interviews, with their work and in
dialogues with some peers. Other designers and developers in support are:
Richard Lemarchand and Nicholas Fortugno. Also, Austin Wintory, composer for
JOURNEY and designers and engineers of the JOURNEY team active during
2009-2012.